American Studies Affiliated Faculty

Kyle Riismandel earned an M.A. in American Studies from Penn State Harrisburg and Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University. He is the author Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001  (Johns Hopkins University Press), a Smithsonian scholars favorite book of 2020. Kyle is also an award-winning instructor teaching courses on cities, suburbs, media, and technology in recent American history. 

Research Interests: 20th/21st century US, cultural history/studies, urban history/studies, media and technology

Publications

Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001, Johns Hopkins University Press, November 2020.

“‘Say You Love Satan’: Teens and Popular Occulture in 1980s America,” in Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945, Sara Fieldston, Susan Eckelman, and Paul Renfro, eds., University of Georgia Press, December 2019.

“Columbus and QUBE: Democracy, Interactive Cable Systems, and the Digital Town Square in the Early 1980s,” MediaCommons, June 14, 2019.

“Mallrats and Arcade Addicts: Producing and Policing Suburban Public Space in 1980s America,” Environment, Space, Place, Vol. 5, Issue 2, Fall 2013, 65-89.

Works in Progress

Remote Control: An Analog History of the Digital World since 1970

Courses Taught

Undergraduate: The 20th Century World; Technology and Culture in American History; Contemporary America; B-boys, Punks, Gangstas, and Slackers: Space, Place, and Power in American Music; Cities in History; Historical Problems Through Film: Conspiracy and Paranoia in 1970s America; History of Technology: Technology and the Consumer’s Republic, 1945-Present; Legal Issues in Media History; The History of the American Suburb; Law and the Digital World 

Graduate: History and American Studies Research Seminar: The Urban Experience

www.kyleriismandel.com

Email: kyle.riismandel@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1886

243A Conklin Hall

Alexandra Chang is Associate Professor of Practice with the Art History program at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and affiliated with the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. Chang works on the topics of EcoArt and Global Asias Art at RU-N, where she gathers the monthly ExternalEcoArt Salons at the Paul Robeson Galleries at Express Newark and is a part of the campus-wide ExternalEco Working Group. She organizes the ExternalClimate Working Group, a creative gathering of more than 50 members that bridges Science, Humanities and Arts researchers, scholars, artists, practitioners, and institutions for short and long term collaborations considering climate, data, policy, power, and the history of globalization. She also serves as Vice Chair on the Communications Committee of the Environmental and Climate Network of the Alliance of American Museums.

Chang is the director of the ExternalGlobal Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX) and the ExternalVirtual Asian American Art Museum with A/P/A Institute at NYU. She is Co-Founding Editor of ExternalAsian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) with publisher Brill (Leiden) and institutional partners, the Asia/Pacific/American Institute at New York University and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University. She is Co-Founder of the College Art Association’s affiliated society the ExternalDiasporic Asian Art Network (DAAN). She received the New Leadership Award from ArtTable in 2019.

She served on the curatorial committee of What is Feminist Art? (2019-20, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, National Portrait Gallery) and curated exhibitions including CYJO/Mixed (2019, co-curator with artist, NYU Kimmel Windows); Ming Fay: Beyond Nature (2019 Sapar Contemporary); Zarina: Dark Roads (2017-18, co-curator with artist, A/P/A Institute, NYU), External(ex)CHANGE: History Place Presence (2018, Asian Arts Initiative); Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art (2017-2018, lead curator, Getty PST II: LA/LA, Chinese American Museum and California African American Museum); Portals of Possibility (2017, Smithsonian APAC Culture Lab); 2012+ (2009, co-curator, The Drop: Urban Art Infill special exhibition); Urban Archives: Happy Together — Asian and Asian American Art from the Permanent Collection (2010, Bronx Museum of the Arts); Art, Archives and Activism: Martin Wong’s Downtown Crossings (2009, lead curator, A/P/A Institute, NYU). She also co-curated numerous exhibitions co-founder of the Dream So Much artist collective.

She was the managing editor of Art Asia Pacific and features editor of amNewYork and has written numerous essays for artist monographs and exhibition catalogues. She is the author of Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collectives (Timezone 8, 2018) and editor of Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art (Duke UP, 2018).

Email: alexa.chang@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-3733

Office Location

110 Warren St. Room 321

Frances Bartkowski was director of the RU-Newark Women and Gender Studies Program, the oldest such program at Rutgers, from 1989-2002. She served as chair of the Department of English from 2010-2016, and Interim Chair of the Arts, Culture and Media Department in 2019. She also works closely with graduate students in the American Studies doctoral program and the English Department master’s program.

In 2015 Bartkowski was awarded a $75,000 Chancellor's Seed Grant for her work with The Collaboratory at RU-N.

In 2013 Bartkowski team-taught a course about the HBO show The Wire with Sherri-Ann Butterfield, Professor of Sociology, and Executive Vice Chancellor. In a 2014 series of events inspired by that show and focused on Newark, Bartkowski and Professor Roland Anglin, director of the Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, interviewed Michael K. Williams (aka ”Omar”), one of four actors in The Wire who spoke at Rutgers during that year.

Bartkowski published her first novel, An Afterlife in 2018, and is also the author of Feminist Utopias, 1989; Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates, 1995; and Kissing Cousins: A Kinship Bestiary, 2008.

Frances Bartkowski has taught courses in feminist theory, literature and criticism, memoir and autobiography, travel writing, utopian fiction, 20th century American and European fiction, and authors Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.

Bartkowski’s research interests include feminism, animal studies, trauma and memory studies.

Sterling L. Bland is an associate professor of English. Until beginning a yearlong research sabbatical during the 2006-2007 academic year, Professor Bland served as associate dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He received his doctorate from New York University. His areas of research and teaching include nineteenth-century American literature; African American literature and culture; autobiography; narrative theory; theory of the novel; and jazz studies.

He has published widely in the area of African American literature and culture. His most recent research is contained in an essay entitled “Fire and Romance: African American Literature since World War II,” which appears in A Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Hendin (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Professor Bland’s previous book publications include Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation (Greenwood, 2000), which explores the ways slave narrators, in the confluence of cultural and political contexts, rhetorically sought to create and authorize themselves and define their experiences. He also collected and annotated a three-volume anthology of out-of-print slave narratives entitled African American Slave Narratives: An Anthology (Greenwood, 2001).

Professor Bland is currently working on a book-length project entitled Rewriting the Race: A Cultural History of Twentieth-Century African American Literature. This project is a literary cultural history that examines the trajectory of African American literature through the twentieth century.

Professor Bland is a member of numerous literary organizations, including the Modern Language Association and The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and serves on a number of professional boards.

Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. His research and teaching interests include Asian American history, the United States in the Pacific world, and race, migration, and labor in the Americas. His current book project, tentatively titled Occupying Knowledge: Expertise, Technocracy, and De-Colonization in the U.S. Occupation of Korea, examines the role of technocrats and expert knowledge in the U.S. Occupation of Korea.

Research Interests: Modern U.S. History, Histories of Race, Migration, and Labor in the Americas, and the United States in the Pacific world

Email: kchang4@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-3823

Office Location

313 Conklin Hall

175 University Ave

Newark, NJ 07102

I began my duties as an Assistant Professor of Spanish and US Latina/o Studies in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University-Newark in the Fall of 2009.  Prior to Rutgers, I held academic appointments at Yale University, Brown University, and UMass-Boston.  My areas of interest include: Caribbean literature, US Latina/o literature, Spanish American literature, Comparative literature, Cultural Studies, American Studies, and Critical Theory.

Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative (Bucknell UP, 2014). Macho Ethics examines the vicissitudes and ambiguities behind literary authorship/authority and masculinity as critically staged through writing in the narrative prose (novels, chronicles, and short stories) of Latino-Caribbean authors starting in the 1980’s. Beyond this book project, I have also been at work on two manuscripts: Loving Death: The Necrophilic Imagination in Latin/o America and Tales of Disposability: Puerto Rico in the Post-911 Era.

Email: jasoncor@newark.rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1026

 Conklin Hall

175 University Avenue 

Newark, NJ 07102

Kimberly DaCosta Holton's research focuses primarily on expressive culture in Iberia and the Lusophone diaspora. She is particularly interested in the intersection between music, migration and politics. Holton's research fields also include 20th century Portuguese and Brazilian literature, performance theory, urban festivity, urban ethnography, migration and memory studies, oral history, theories of globalism, nation, diaspora and space. Holton is the founder and director of the Ironbound Oral History Project, a collection of over 250 oral history interviews with Portuguese-speaking migrants of NJ/NY. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Institute for Research on Women. Holton is currently at work on a book about fado performance in the US. 

Courses Taught

Portuguese Literature in English Translation: Tales of Travel; Portuguese Literature in English Translation: Writing Places; Oral History of the Ironbound; Post-Revolutionary Portuguese Literature and Culture; Soccer, Samba and Spiritualism: Performing the Nation in Portugal and Brazil; Migration Stories: Portuguese-American Literature and Culture; Urban Ethnography; Immigration and Performance (Graduate Class); Elementary Portuguese

Email: kholton@newark.rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-5494

Office Location

405 Conklin Hall

Belinda Edmondson is a Professor in the Departments of English and African American and African Studies; and an affiliate member of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies

She is the author of the Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (forthcoming, Oxford University Press),  Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Cornell University Press 2009), Making Men (Duke University Press 1999) and the editor of Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation (University of Virginia Press 1999). She has also published several chapters and articles on Caribbean literature, African diaspora cultural studies, and gender studies, in venues such as The Journal of Transnational American Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Small Axe, Cultural Critique and Callaloo. Professor Edmondson serves on the editorial boards of the journals Anthurium and Signs. She has been the recipient of the Schomburg Fellowship; the Society for the Humanities Fellowship; the Mellon Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Humanities Stipend, and a Ford Foundation Summer Fellowship, among others.

Courses Taught

COMPARATIVE CARIBBEAN & AFRICAN FICTION
RACE, GENDER & AMERICAN FILM
MIGRATION IN LITERATURE & FILM
WOMEN'S LIT AFRICA
MODERN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE

Email: edmondsn@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1586

Office Location

320 Conklin

175 University Ave.

Newark, NJ 07102

Tel: 973-353-1586

Marta Elena Esquilin is the Associate Dean of the Honors Living-Learning Community and Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the American Studies Program within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers-Newark. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Vermont in 1999, and her Master’s Degree in 2003 from Teachers College, Columbia University in Higher Education Administration. In 2005, under the leadership of Dr. Derald Wing Sue within the Counseling & Psychology department at Teachers College, she was a co-author of the seminal article, “Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice”.  American Psychologist, 62(4), 271-286.  From 2005 to 2015, Marta served as the Director of Social Justice and Intercultural Programs within the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Columbia University.  Prior to her role at Columbia, she worked at The Posse Foundation and in a variety of community based organizations focused on youth development, college access & equity, and community building.  She is currently the Board chair of CLAGS (Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies), the oldest LGBTQ research center in the country, and she is the first Latina to serve in this role.  She works as a diversity expert and consultant within educational settings including secondary schools, community-based organizations, and higher education institutions around the United States.  

Marta’s passion and current work focuses on creating educational environments that encourage the positive development and success of all students. She is particularly interested in raising awareness about how microaggressions manifest to create hostile environments for marginalized social identities within work and school settings.  Most recently, she has been developing trainings and assessment tools aimed at increasing cultural competence, addressing the impacts of microaggressions, and creating sustainable infrastructures to support student success within educational settings. Her work aims to equip administrators, faculty, staff and students with the skills necessary for creating environments that are affirming to all identities and experiences. 

Email: marta.esquilin@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-2847

Office Location

422 Conklin Hall

175 University Avenue

Newark, NJ 07102

Ruth Feldstein received her Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 1996.  Her research, writing and teaching reflect her interest in gender and race and in media and politics as intersecting categories that shape each other. Her first book, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (Cornell, 2000), is an intellectual and cultural history of liberalism from the New Deal to the Great Society. By tracing a developing consensus about black women as bad “matriarchs” and white women as bad “moms” in a range of sources-- films, popular news media, intellectual discourse, civil rights activism, and welfare legislation--this book argued that conservative gender ideologies were central to the process through which race became prominent in American liberalism.

She is currently completing a manuscript about black women entertainers (Lena Horne, Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Diahann Carroll, Abbey Lincoln and Cicely Tyson) and their significance to the civil rights movement and to the development of second-wave feminism.

Professor Feldstein has received support for her research from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute; the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University; the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University; and the American Association for University Women, among others.  An article about Nina Simone that appeared in the Journal of American History, was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Best Article on Black Women’s History.

Research Interests: United States history, with focus on 20th-century culture and politics; women's and gender history; and African American history

Courses Taught

Undergraduate: American Popular Cultures, 1890-1945; American Popular Cultures, 1945-2001; African American Women's History, Slavery-Present; History of Sexuality in the U.S., 1900-Present

Graduate: Introduction to American Studies: Scope and Methods; Narrating Race:  Research Seminar on “Race” and American Studies; The United States in the 1960s and 70s: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Contested Period; American Popular Cultures: Research Seminar

How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement

Facebook page

Federated History Department

Email: feldst@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-3884

Office Location

308 Conklin Hall

175 University Ave.

Newark, NJ 07102

James Goodman teaches history and creative writing. His passion, as a writer, as a teacher, and as the U.S. editor of the journal Rethinking History, has been to take literary form seriously in the reading and writing of history and every other form of non-fiction.  He believes that all writing (humanities scholarship no less than the fiction, poetry, and drama that humanists study) is creative writing.  His issues of Rethinking History feature the work of historians, scholars in other fields, creative writers inside and outside academe, and graphic artists struggling to find the forms—the literary structures, the perspective(s), the images, the voice(s), the words, the pace--that do their subjects the most justice.  His first book is  a narrative history of the Scottsboro Case and controversy written from many different points of view. His second book, Blackout, is a quick-cutting, kaleidoscopic recreation of the the blackout and blackout looting in NYC in the summer of 1977.  For his most recent book, he wandered far afield, exploring the long and twisted life of one of the most famous and infamous Hebrew bible stories, Genesis 22.  But Where Is the Lamb? Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac was published by Schocken Books in 2013.   He has received fellowships and awards from NYU, Princeton, Rutgers, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stories of Scottsboro was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Research, Teaching, and Writing: U.S. history; African-American history and race relations; historical writing; creative non-fiction; history as fiction; fiction as history; what history is and why it matters

Courses Taught

Graduate Courses: Reading and Writing Narrative History; The Poetics of History;U.S. History in Fiction and Fact; Writing American History; Non-Fiction Writing Workshop

Undergraduate Courses: The History and Literature of Fact; U.S. History in Fiction and Fact; Contemporary U.S. History; U.S. History in the Courtroom: Race and Politics Since Reconstruction; Reading and Writing About War 

Email: goodmanj@rutgers.edu

Office Location

307 Conklin Hall

175 University Ave.

Newark, NJ 07102

Courses Taught

Constitutional Law; Civil Liberties; Contemporary Constitutional Issues; Administrative Law; Problems in American Government.

Expertise: Public law; 14th Amendment; minority rights.

Publications

The Disenfranchisement of  Ex-Felons. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2006.

Taking Liberties: National Barriers to the Free Flow of Ideas. New York/London/Westport. Praeger, 1990.

Without Justice of All: Constitutional Rights of Aliens. Westport, Ct. Greenwood Press. 1985.

Email: eahull@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1548

Office Location

Room 720, Hill Hall

Jyl Josephson is Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.  She is the author of Rethinking Sexual Citizenship, (SUNY Press, 2016), and is co-editor with Cynthia Burack of the Queer Politics and Cultures series for SUNY Press. She has written on gender, sexuality, and public policy, primarily in the context of U.S. social policy.   Her work has also been published in journals such as Politics and Gender, Journal of Poverty, Politics and Gender, New Political Science, and Perspectives on Politics, and Trans Studies Quarterly.

Josephson teaches a graduate course in Feminist Research Methods, which also serves as a methods course for the Political Science MA program. She teaches undergraduate courses in political theory and, for the Women’s and Gender Studies program, she teaches the politics of sexuality course. She spent the spring 2011 semester teaching at the University of Iceland as a Fulbright lecturing scholar, affiliated with the Center for Women’s and Gender Research (RIKK). Since then, she has conducted research, along with Icelandic colleagues, of feminist, queer, and trans activists regarding their views of gender and sexuality equality in Iceland. She has also conducted research on community organizing, and her newest project is on democracy and higher education. 

Josephson is currently serving as chair of the Political Science Department. From 2004 to 2008, she served as Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University-Newark, and she has served in number of other administrative roles including as Acting Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies, and as Co-chair in spring 2014 of the Rutgers University-Newark Strategic Planning Oversight Committee. The committee’s charrette groups and town hall meetings, along with Chancellor Cantor’s listening tour provided the input that was the basis of RU-N’s initial strategic planning recommendations.

Courses Taught: Democracy and Citizenship, American Political Theory; Modern Political Theory; LGBT Politics; Feminist Research Methods; Politics of Sexuality

Publications

Gender, Families, and State: Child Support Policy in the United States, 1997, Rowman & Littlefield.

Fundamental Differences: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatism, 2003, co-edited with Cynthia Burack, Rowman & Littlefield.

Gender and American Politics: Women, Men, and the Political Process, 200 and 2005 (2nd ed.), co-edited with Sue Tolleson Rinehart, M.E. Sharpe. 

Rethinking Sexual Citizenship, 2016, SUNY Press.​

Email: jylj@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-5125

Office Location

Hill Hall 716

Research Interests: Early American Literature, U.S. Literature, Rhetoric

Email: kiniry@newark.rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-5820

Office Location

360 Dr. Martin L. King Blvd.

Hill Hall 527

Newark, New Jersey 07102

Mark Krasovic received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 2008. His research and teaching interests center on the cultural and political history of the modern United States, urban history, and the public arts and humanities. His first book,The Newark Frontier: Community Action in the Great Society, was published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2016. It examines how the structures of 1960s liberalism – structures that brought together government officials, academics, and local Newarkers in new and complicated ways – confronted the perceived crisis of America’s cities. The manuscript is based on his dissertation, which was the honorable mention finalist for the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize.

His current book project explores federally funded arts projects in the 1960s, especially those funded by the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, the War on Poverty, and the Model Cities Program. This research has been supported by a Nancy Weiss Malkiel Junior Faculty Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Dr. Krasovic also serves as the interim director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University-Newark, where he was the 2008-2010 Geraldine R. Dodge Postdoctoral Fellow. At the Price Institute, he has served as the local Newark coordinator for the federal Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, a cosponsor of the “This is Newark!” Public Symposium on Urban Design, a facilitator for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities’ statewide film series, and the co-organizer of the Ironbound Environmental Justice History and Resource Center. He also serves on the executive board of the Newark History Society, the Education Committee of the Newark Museum, and the steering committee of the Northeast Public Humanities Consortium.

Research Interests: modern United State cultural and intellectual history; urban, New Jersey, and Newark history; the public arts and humanities

Courses Taught: American Cultural and Intellectual History; America in the 1970s; Race and Urban Space; Humanities in the Public Square

Publications

The Newark Frontier: Community Action in the Great Society (University of Chicago Press, 2016) 

“Scottsboro on the Delaware,” review of Jersey Justice: The Story of the Trenton Six by Kathy D. Knepper. Reviews in American History, 41, no. 1 (March 2013).

Review of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Suleiman Osman. Journal of American History, January 2012.

“The Culture of Development in the Brick City.”  In Urban Asymmetries: Studies on Uneven Urban Development, edited by Tahl Kaminer et al.  Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011.

Exhibition review of “What’s Going On: Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties.” New Jersey Historical Society. Journal of American History, June 2009.

Email: krasovic@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1051

Laura Lomas, Professor (Ph.D. Columbia 2001), teaches comparative American studies, Latina/o/x literature and culture, ethnic and immigrant literature of the United States and the Americas, women's writing, nineteenth century studies, and feminist and decolonial theory in the English Department and the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. Lomas is author of Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects and American Modernities (Duke University Press, 2008), which received the Modern Language Association's Prize for best book in Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino Studies, and an Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association's Latino Studies Section Book Award.  Against monumentalizing and nation-centered readings, this book defines New York-based Cuban José Martí as a cultural translator of the imperial modernity of the United States in texts addressed to readers throughout the Hispanophone world. This perspective, as an organizer of Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants in New York, as a racialized Latino migrant inside the monster's entrails--as he famously situated himself--shaped his aesthetic experiments in modernist poetry and prose in the 1880s and 1890s. 

She is completing a book entitled In Between States: New York Latinx Writing and the Emergence of the Interdisciplines, and a co-edited and translated volume, Against Dichotomies: The Collected Writings of Lourdes Casal.

She has served as Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, co-founded the Latina/o Studies Working Group, co-founded the Immigrant rights Collective, and was Founding Faculty Director of a Cuba study abroad program at Rutgers University-Newark. She has served as an Associate Editor of Signs, on the Advisory Board of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and on the Editorial Boards of Hostos Review,  and of Periférica: Journal of Social, Cultural and Literary History.  

Courses Taught

Undergraduate:: Reading Latinx Literature: Undocumented Subjects; Race, Nation and Borders in American Literature; Latina/o Literature and Culture; Representing Cuba; NY/NJ Borderlands: Seminar in Interdisciplinary Humanities; Literature of Migration in the Americas; Perspectives on American Modernity; The Chronicle and the City: José Martí's New York; Studies in American Authors; Foundations of Literary Study; Women and World Literature; Literature of the Americas; Western Literature Since the Renaissance; Writing and Incarceration

Graduate: Theories of Translation and Transculturation; Latina Feminist Theory; Undocumented Subjects: Narratives of Migration from Latin America; The Politics of Reproduction; Subjects of Empire:  Theories and Contexts from the Americas

Publications

Books:

Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects and American Modernities  (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; Winner, MLA Best Book in Latina/o and Chicana/o Studies; Honorable Mention Latino Studies Section, Latin American Studies Association).

Co-Edited Volumes: 

Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (2018, Choice Outstanding Academic Title)

Articles in Peer Reviewed Journals:

“Desdoblamiento after Colonization: Julia de Burgos’s Latinx Modernism.” Forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity.

"La escritura interdisciplinaria de Lourdes Casal." Revista de Literatura Cubana (2018).

"'El negro es tan capaz como el blanco': José Martí, 'Pachín' Marín, Lucy Parsons y la política de la diáspora hispanoamericana en Nueva York a finales del siglo XIX," Anuario de Estudios Martianos, 40 (2017).

"On the 'Shock' of Diaspora: Lourdes Casal's Critical Interdisciplinarity and Intersectional Feminism," Cuban Studies 46 (2018): 10-38.

"Translation and Transculturation in the New York-Hispanic Caribbean Borderlands." Small Axe 48 (2016): 147-62.

“Migration and Decolonial Politics in Two Afro-Latino Poets: “Pachín” Marín and “Tato” Laviera,” REVIEW: Latin American Literature and Arts 89.48.2 (Fall 2014): 155-163. Special Issue Nicolás Kanellos, ed. The Americas in New York: Writing and Arts in La Gran Manzana.

“Thinking-Across, Infiltration and Transculturation: José Martí’s Theory and Practice of Post- Colonial Translation in New York” Special Issue Translation Review, Regina Galasso and Carmen Boullosa, eds. (Fall 2011): 13-35.

Email: llomas@newark.rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-5203

Office Location

360 Dr. Martin L. King Blvd.

Hill Hall 519

Newark, New Jersey 07102

Neil Maher received his Ph.D. in history from New York University in 2001, and currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. environmental and political history, urban environmental history, and environmental justice.  He is the author of two books, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017) and Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2007), and has been interviewed for more than a dozen radio programs, served as historical consultant on several documentaries for the History Channel, PBS, and the American Experience series, and has written for popular audiences in the New York Times and The Washington Post. He is currently co-writing a textbook on the use of visual images in historical research, writing, and teaching, and researching his next monograph on the environmental history of the urban crisis during the 1960s era.

Research Interests: 20th century U.S. environmental history, political history, urban history, and the history of environmental justice

Courses Taught: Environmental Justice in Postwar America; Urban Environmental History; Food History and American Culture; The 1960s Era in American History; Landscape and Culture in America; Topics in Global Environmental History; Research Seminar in Environmental History

Selected Publications:

Books:

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017)

Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Journal Articles:

“Graphic History and the Art of Collaboration,” essay in Reviews in American History 48 (2020): 112-118.

“Bringing the Environment Back In: A Transnational History of Landsat,” in How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, John Krige, ed., University of Chicago Press, 2019: 201-224.

“Whole Earth Without Borders: Earth Photographs, Space Data, and the Importance of Visual Culture Within Environmental History,” in A Field on Fire: Essays on the Future of Environmental History, Mark Hersey and Theodore Steinberg, eds., University of Alabama Press, 2019: 189-208.

“Grounding the Space Race,” special feature essay on the Apollo 11 moon landing in the inaugural edition of Modern American History, 1, no. 1 (March 2018): 141-146.

Popular Essays and Op-Eds:

“The Keys to Ensuring That a Green New Deal Succeeds,” Washington Post, 7 August 2019, available at: Externalhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/07/flaw-all-democrats-green-new-deal-proposals/.

“Not Everyone Wanted a Man on the Moon,” New York Times, Op-Ed, 16 July 2019, available at: Externalhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/opinion/apollo-11-nasa-woodstock.html.

“How Many Times Does a River Have to Burn Before It Matters?,” New York Times, 22 June 2019, available at: Externalhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/climate/cleveland-fire-river-cuyahoga-1969.html

https://history.njit.edu/faculty/maher

https://www.neilmaher.com/

Email: maher@njit.edu

Phone: 973-596-6348

Office Location

325 Cullimore Hall

New Jersey Institute of Technology

University Heights

Newark, NJ 07102

Lyra D. Monteiro (she/zie) received her PhD from Brown University in 2012, and specializes in public humanities, early United States history, and race and ethnic identity. Her work focuses on the uses of the past in public culture, with a particular emphasis on issues of race and representation in the telling of the United States’ pasts. She is the recipient of the 2016 Walter and Lillian Lowenfels Award for Criticism from the American Book Awards for her work on the Broadway musical Hamilton. Her review essay in The Public Historian, titled “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” argued that despite its celebrated multiracial casting, the play reinforces the idea that the United States’ past was populated solely by white people, thus normalizing and legitimizing white power in the present. Her current book project Liberation Archaeology, introduces an anti-oppressive, trauma-informed approach to engaging with the past, specifically designed for people of color in the US. Responding to traditional, teleological models of history, which selectively narrate the past as if it inevitably led us to the hierarchies of power that characterize our present, this book turns that model on its head, and instead approaches the past explicitly from the perspective of the present; and from the perspective of a specific site: the reader. Through a series of case studies, the book guides readers through an excavation of the many layers of empire and other matrices of power that have shaped them. Written at this moment in history, when books supporting white education about anti-racism proliferate, Liberation Archaeology is an intervention and an offering: It reframes the past as a site of liberation from the lies of nationalism, capitalism, and patriarchal white supremacy, and it teaches a practice to support our individual and communal efforts to get free. 

Dr. Monteiro also directs The Museum On Site, a public humanities/art project that aims to help people understand their worlds through site-specific, free public experiences that share ideas and information in accessible and stimulating ways. Previous projects have included an installation at the public festival WaterFire Providence, combining public performances and participatory ritual to address the history and legacy of Rhode Island’s transatlantic slave trade; a photo-based diorama of a busy street in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, displayed in a store window with labels that shared stories from the past and present of the people, buildings, and things on two blocks (www.westminsterstories.com); and a pop-up museum that filled a real street with hundreds of museum labels about that street (www.tinyurl.com/museumvideo). Dr. Monteiro's current project with The Museum On Site is called "Washington's Next!" and was originally presented in October 2018 as part of the Art in Odd Places BODY Festival and Exhibition (www.washingtonsnext.com). Last summer, "Washington's Next!" explored the hundreds of statue attacks that took place in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, through the project "How to Kill a Statue" on Instagram and Twitter, as well as an interactive digital map of the more than 100 racist statues removed between May 30, 2020 and June 30, 2020. 

She has also worked on curatorial, education, and development projects for over a dozen museums and cultural institutions, including the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Harvard Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. 

Courses Taught

Undergraduate: 

Liberation Archaeology; Race and Gender in American Film; Introduction to African American and African Studies I; African-American History I; Introduction to Public History; Intergroup Dialogue: Race (co-taught with Honors Living-Learning Community Associate Dean Marta Esquilin); Race and Identity in the Early United States; History of the United States I; Ind. Study: African American History and Education Prior to the Civil War

Graduate: Public Histories of Slavery for the 21st Century; Public History: Community Engagement and Site-Specific Storytelling; Ind. Study: African American Memory and Counter-Memory

Selected papers available at: https://ncas-rutgers.academia.edu/LyraMonteiro

Publications

BOOK:

Edited with Andrew Losowsky, A Thousand Ships: A Ritual of Remembrance Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Providence: The Museum On Site, 2012)

ARTICLES:

"How a Trump Executive Order Aims to Set White Supremacy in Stone,” Hyperallergic, January 12, 2021.

“Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.” The Public Historian 38, no. 1 (Feb 2016): 89-98. Reprinted in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018).

“Methodology of A Thousand Ships,” in A Thousand Ships: A Ritual of Remembrance Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, eds. A. Losowsky and L. Monteiro (Providence: The Museum On Site, 2012)

“The Mezquita of Córdoba is Made of More than Bricks: Towards a Broader Definition of the ‘Heritage’ Protected at UNESCO World Heritage Sites,” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 7 (2011): 312-328.

Email: lyra.monteiro@rutgers.edu

317 Conklin Hall
175 University Ave.
Newark, NJ 07102

Tim Raphael is a Professor in the Department of Arts Culture and Media and Director of the Center for Migration and the Global City and Newest Americans. He has devised, directed and produced over fifty theatrical productions at venues that include The Kennedy Center, The Public Theater, Theater For A New Audience and New York Theater Workshop. He has also written extensively about the intersection of politics, popular culture and performance for a variety of journals, and in the book The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance. He holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and has taught Theater, Performance Studies, and American Studies at Ursinus College, Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, Georgetown University, and the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon, Portugal. He has won awards for his teaching including The Rutgers Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.

The Center for Migration and the Global City (CMGC) is an incubator for multidisciplinary scholarship, multimedia publication, innovative pedagogy and civic engagement that addresses both the local and global dimensions of migration. CMGC fosters migration research across academic disciplines and the development of educational resources, multimedia curriculum, and public programming that contribute to a better understanding of the impact of contemporary migration and its historical roots.

Newest Americans is a multimedia collaboratory of journalists, media-makers, artists, faculty and students telling the stories that radiate from the most diverse university in the nation and the global city of Newark, NJ. The project produces multimedia stories, gallery and museum exhibits, interactive experiences, and educational curriculum.

The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance examines Reagan’s immersion in radio, film and television to understand how the techniques and technologies of electronic media have transformed American politics and political representation.

Publications

President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance

Email: traphael@newark.rutgers.edu

Mary Rizzo specializes in modern U.S. cultural history, urban studies, public humanities, and digital humanities. She is particularly interested in food studies, representations of cities, and inclusive public history.

After earning her PhD in American Studies from the University Minnesota, she built a successful career in public history. From leading tours of an 18th century historic house museum to being the Associate Director of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the state’s premier provider of public humanities funding and programming, she gained practical experience in how to successfully engage the public with history. Some of her signature achievements include creating a statewide series of public forums and community conversations on environmental justice in New Jersey that brought together philosophers, historians, activists, lawyers, and residents to examine the state of our environment. She also managed Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of HealthCare and PoetryHeals, two programs that used discussions of literature to help alleviate burnout and improve cross-cultural understanding in healthcare.

Through this statewide work, she realized that diversity and inclusion were the most important issues facing public history organizations. To address those issues, she created the Telling Untold Histories Unconference while serving as Public Historian in Residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers-Camden. This annual unconference uses a radically democratic format in which participants create a series of discussion sessions to examine how we can tell more inclusive public histories.

She brings this passion about inclusive public history to her work at Rutgers University-Newark. She created the public humanities MA track in the Graduate Program in American Studies to prepare students to be leaders in public history and humanities organizations. Through her public and digital humanities courses, her students have engaged in hands-on public history work on issues including mass incarceration, immigration detention, police misconduct in Newark, social justice movements, and LGBTQ history. Visit States of Incarceration to see her students’ work on immigration detention in NJ and From Rebellion to Review Board: Newark Fights for Police Accountability, a digital exhibit created by other students. In 2017, Rizzo won the Teaching Award for excellence in teaching NJ history for the travelling and digital Rebellion to Review Board exhibits from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance. She is also on the advisory committee for the award-winning Queer Newark Oral History Project.

An active scholar, writer and researcher, Rizzo is currently working on Come and Be Shocked: Representing Baltimore from John Waters to The Wire. This book examines representations of Baltimore from the 1950s to the early 21st century to see how urban leaders have used art to shape how the city is seen and how artists have fought back through their own representations. Through her research, she discovered a lost Baltimore poetry magazine called Chicory, which she helped digitize and which she hopes will be the basis of a future project. In 2015, she published Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle. She has also published articles in American Quarterly, Museums & Social Issues, Exhibition, The Public Historian, and International Journal of Heritage Studies. She served as co-editor of The Public Historian and was a staff blogger for History@Work.

She has also served as a board member for the National Council on Public History and is on the editorial board of New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She has worked as a consultant with several organizations, including Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, New Jersey State Museum, Gallery Aferro, and the Tuckerton Seaport. She tweets as rizzo_pubhist.

Courses Taught

Graduate: Introduction to Digital Humanities; Introduction to American Studies; Black Arts Movement & Cultural Activism; Place Community and Public Humanities

Email: mary.rizzo@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1166

Office Location

Conklin Hall, Room 247A

Beryl Satter's first book, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (University of California Press, 1999) examined the relationship between New Thought, a popular, proto-New Age religious movement, the late nineteenth-century women's movement, and Progressivism. It traced the ways that New Thought adherents engaged with and sometimes contested contemporary ideas about gender, race and sexuality. It also showed the influence of ideas about gender, race and sexuality on American religion, health and politics.  It outlined the ways that debates on these issues shaped the transition from a Victorian to a modern social order. Her articles "Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and the Gender Politics of Race Difference and Race Neutrality," American Quarterly 47:4 (March 1996): 43-76 and "The Sexual Abuse Paradigm in Historical Perspective: Passivity and Emotion in Mid-Twentieth-Century America," Journal of the History of Sexuality 12: 3 (July 2003): 424-464 similarly examine the relationship between gender, politics and sexuality in two distinct cultural moments during the twentieth century.

Dr. Satter’s second book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009), won the Liberty Legacy Award in Civil Rights History and the National Jewish Book Award in History, and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Ron Ridenhouer Book Prize.  It told the story of Dr. Satter's father, attorney Mark J. Satter, who fought exploitative, racially based real estate speculation in Chicago, and the many community activists who continued this battle after Mark Satter's death. In the late 1960s these activists formed an organization, the Contract Buyers League (CBL), which consisted of African-American residents of Chicago's West and South Sides.  The CBL fought redlining as well as the state and federal laws that enabled racially biased credit policies to flourish. Their efforts ultimately culminated in the passage of two landmark pieces of federal legislation in the 1970s -- the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.  One part of the story of this mid-twentieth-century battle against housing exploitation is presented in Dr. Satter's article "'Our greatest moments of glory have been fighting the institutions we love the most': the Rise and Fall of Chicago's Interreligious Council on Urban Affairs, 1958-1969," U.S. Catholic Historian 22:2 (Spring 2004): 33-44.

Dr. Satter is a co-founder of the Queer Newark Oral History Project, and has received several awards for her work on behalf of LGBT youth.  She is the author of scholarly articles on topics ranging from black police offers’ struggles against police brutality to the role of therapeutic practices the New Left. She has been interviewed about housing discrimination and police brutality on numerous radio programs and by many media outlets. Ta-Nehisi Coates drew upon her work on contract selling in Chicago for his award-winning article “The Case for Reparations.”  In 2015, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.  She is currently working on a book about credit, racism, and uneven development, which she will analyze through the history of a pioneering community development bank called ShoreBank."

For more information on Dr. Satter's current projects visit 

http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/beryl-satter.

Courses Taught

The 1920s and the Great Depression; History of Women in the United States; The Twenties and the New Deal; America in the Sixties;Selected Topics in American Urban and Ethnic History; American History, 1912-1945; American History 1945-Present

Publications

“Cops, Gangs, and Revolutionaries in 1960s Chicago:  What Black Police Can Tell Us About Power,” forthcoming at the Journal of Urban History, pp. 1-25.  See: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/0096144214566985v1.pdf?ijkey=wYIFZfiOWxzQjET&keytype=finite

“The Left,” for Tim Aubry and Trysh Travis, eds., Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 119-131.

“A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project,” written with Darnell Moore, Timothy Stewart-Winter and Whitney Strub, QED:  A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1:2 (Summer 2014): 1-14.

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009) (paperback 2010).

"'Our greatest moments of glory have been fighting the institutions we love the most': the Rise and Fall of Chicago's Interreligious Council on Urban Affairs, 1958-1969," U.S. Catholic Historian 22:2 (Spring 2004): 33-44.

"The Sexual Abuse Paradigm in Historical Perspective: Passivity and Emotion in Mid-Century America," Journal of the History of Sexuality 12: 3 (July 2003).

Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). (Paperback, 2001).

Email: satter@newark.rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-3900

Office Location

336 Conklin Hall

175 University Ave.

Newark, NJ 07102

Courses Taught

UNDERGRADUATE: 790:385 Religion & Politics; 790:371 Early Political Theory; 790:372 Modern Political Theory; 790:356 Sex, Law, and Public Policy.

GRADUATE: 790:512 Ethical Issues in Public Policy and Administration; 790: 520 Liberalism, Religion, and Toleration; 790:511 Contemporary Political Theory; 790:571 American Politics & Public Policy; 790:608 American Political Thought; 790:513 Ethics & Global Politics

AWARDS:  

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Princeton University;  Ford Foundation Lecturer in Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard Divinity School;  Henry Luce Fellow in Theology at Harvard Divinity School; Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at University of Warsaw in Spring 1999;  Fulbright Senior Specialist, University of Warsaw, Fall 2001.  Charles Pine Outstanding Teacher Award, Rutgers Newark, 1998.

Expertise

Religion & Politics in the United States and in comparative perspective; public policy and church-state relations.  Catholics and American Politics. Catholic bishops and public policy (e.g., abortion politics and same-sex marriage).   Current research is on the political implications of the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Publications

Faith-Based Initiatives & the Bush Administration: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (with J. Formicola and P. Weber (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).  

Piety, Politics, and Pluralism: Religion, the Courts and the 2000 Election (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); 

A Wall of Separation: Debating the Public role of Religion, with Ted Jelen (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998);  

Abortion Politics in American States, with Timothy Byrnes (M.E. Sharpe Pub, 1995); 

The Catholic Church and Abortion Politics: A View From the States, with Timothy Byrnes (Westview Press, 1992). 

Email: segers@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1324

Office Location

Hill Hall 729

I am co-director and co-founder of the Global Urban Studies doctoral program and Professor of Political Science. My research and teaching areas include urban politics and policy, race/ethnicity and politics, immigration, and public policy. One thread connecting my work and my teaching is an interest in advocacy organizations and NGOs, their roles in urban governance, and their relationship to public policy. 

My current research and writing examines urban policy analysis, gentrification, and urban refugees and immigrants. These are interdisciplinary collaborative projects, some including cross-national comparative work. My most recent work (with David Kaufmann, ETH-Zurich) focuses on dimensions of urban policy analysis in an edited volume forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. I also have studied how local immigrant-serving NGOs help make a place for immigrants in civic life, and how national and local immigration and social welfare policies shape what NGOs do and how they do it.  Another area of expertise is housing. I have researched policies designed to combat racial discrimination, including Fair Housing laws and Community Reinvestment laws, along with other affordable housing strategies. I also studied education reform efforts in multiethnic cities. Always, I place special focus on the work of advocacy organizations in cities.  

Theoretically, I engage social construction, institutionalist, multi-level governance, and critical urban theory approaches, using them to examine inequality – its persistence, transformations, and the possibilities for breaking it down.  

Courses Taught

Undergraduate Courses: 790: 307 Public Policy Analysis; 790: 309 The Politics of Policy Making; 790: 364 Race & Ethnicity in U.S. Politics; 790: 360 Urban Politics

Graduate Courses: 790: 550 Citizenship, Immigration Politics, American Identity; 790: 545 Race & Ethnicity in U.S. Politics; 790: 515; 977: 624 Urban Governance in Global Perspective

Publications

Books

External

Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education, 2006, co-authored with Rodney E. Hero, Susan E. Clarke, Luis Fraga, Bari Anhalt Erlichson. Temple University Press.

Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action, 2003, University Press of Kansas. Named an “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice magazine.

Edited Volume

Handbook of Public Policy Analysis, 2006, co-edited with Frank Fischer and Gerald Miller. Taylor & Francis. Sidney ― August 2010 3

Edited Symposium

Symposium: Toward an Urban Policy Analysis, co-edited with David Kaufmann. 2020. PS: Political Science and Politics, 53 (1) (Seven essays)

Refereed Journal Articles

“Measuring and Explaining Stalled Gentrification in Newark, New Jersey: The Role of Racial Politics,” forthcoming, Urban Affairs Review. (with Domingo Morel, Akira Drake Rodriguez, Nakeefa Garay, Adam Straub).

“Outside-In Political Science: Implementing Community-Engaged Pedagogy Across the Political Science Major,” forthcoming, PS: Political Science and Politics, (with Nermin Allam, Janice Gallagher, Jyl Josephson).

"Toward an Urban Policy Analysis: Incorporating Participation, Multilevel Governance, and Seeing Like A City," 2020, PS: Political Science and Politics, 53 (1) 1-5. (David Kaufmann and Mara Sidney)

Email: msidney@newark.rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-5787

Office Location

723 Hill Hall

Paul Sternberger received his Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University and joined the faculty of Rutgers-Newark in 1997. His publications include Between Amateur and Aesthete: The Legitimization of Photography in America, 1880-1900 (The University of New Mexico Press, 2001) and By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) which he co-authored with Professor Ned Drew. His collaborations with with Prof. Drew also includes the books Purity of Aim: The Book Jackets of Alvin Lustig (Rochester Institute of Technology Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2010) and George Giusti: The Idea is the Heart of the Matter (Rochester Institute of Technology Press, 2016). Professor Sternberger co-curatored the groundbreaking exhibition India: Public Places, Private Spaces: Contemporary Photography and Video Art with an accompanying catalog published by Marg Publications in 2007. His articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as History of Photography, American Art, Photographies, The Journal of the History of Collections, The Woman's Art Journal, and Arts of Asia. Professor Sternberger teaches courses in American Art and the History of Photography, as well as courses such as The Development of Modern Art; Art Since 1945; American Popular Film in the 1970s; Newark: A History of Art, Architecture, and Cultural Institutions; Introduction to Arts, Culture and Media; and introductory Art History surveys. 

Email: sternberger@newark.rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-3735

Timothy Stewart-Winter specializes in LGBTQ history and the politics of sexuality and gender in the modern United States. He is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark, where he also teaches in the American Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies programs. His first book, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Penn, 2016; paperback, August 2017), was awarded the 2017 John Boswell Prize by the Committee on LGBT History. He is now working on a book about the scandal surrounding Walter Jenkins, a longtime aide to Lyndon B. Johnson who resigned from the White House staff in 1964 after being arrested on disorderly conduct charges. He co-directs the Queer Newark Oral History Project.

Stewart-Winter's work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, Gender & History, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. He also writes regularly about LGBTQ politics and history for a wider audience, including op-eds in the 

New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Star-Ledger (N.J.), and commentaries in Dissent and Slate. He has appeared on “All Things Considered" (NPR), and was interviewed about Queer Clout on “Chicago Tonight” (WTTW television) and “Morning Drive” (WBEZ radio).

Stewart-Winter received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and his B.A. in history from Swarthmore College. In 2017-2018, he was a fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

Follow him on Twitter: 

@timothysw

Courses Taught

Undergraduate: Contemporary US History; Introduction to LGBTQ Studies; Urban Sexualities in the Modern US; Senior Seminar: Civil Rights and Social Movements

Graduate: Introduction to American Studies; Race and Sexual Politics in Modern America; Gender in US Politics and Culture Since 1900; Sexuality and Sexual Politics 

Publications

Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; paperback, August 2017)

“The Fall of Walter Jenkins and the Hidden History of the Lavender Scare,” in Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in U.S. History, Margot Canaday, Robert Self, and Nancy Cott, eds. (University of Chicago Press, 2021), 211-234

“AIDS and the Urban Crisis: Stigma, Cost, and the Persistence of Racism in Chicago, 1981-1996,” in Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State Since the 1970s, Jonathan Bell, ed. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 83-99

“The Gay Rights President,” in The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment, Julian E. Zelizer, ed. (Princeton University Press, 2018), 95-110

“Ralph Arnold’s Queer Chicago: A Life at the Intersections,” in The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity, and Politics, Greg Foster-Rice, ed. (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018), 113-126

“The Law and Order Origins of Urban Gay Politics,” Journal of Urban History 41:5 (September 2015), 1-11

“Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of American History 102:1 (June 2015), 61-72

“A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project” (with Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, and Whitney Strub), QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1:2 (Summer 2014), 1-14

Op-Eds, Blogs, and Popular Publications

“How the Black Press Helped Pave the Way for Gay Rights,” Washington Post, Made By History, August 5, 2019

Email: timsw@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-1914

Office Location

314 Conklin Hall

175 University Ave.

Newark, NJ 07102

Whitney Strub received his doctorate in U.S. history from UCLA, and taught at the University of Miami, California State University-Fullerton, UCLA, and Temple University before joining the Federated Department at Rutgers, where he is associate professor.

His first book, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right, was published in 2011 by Columbia University Press. It charts the use of antipornography campaigns as organizing devices in the mobilization of the modern conservative movement and its “family values” agenda, and also shows the failure of modern liberalism to adequately respond to reactionary sexual politics. His second book, Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (University Press of Kansas, 2013) charts the history of obscenity doctrine in patrolling the boundaries of sexual citizenship from the colonial era through the twenty-first century, but especially through the still-binding 1957 Supreme Court case Roth v. U.S., which established that obscene materials are not protected by the First Amendment. Most recently, he co-edited Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), with Carolyn Bronstein.

Strub’s articles, covering such topics as censorship and race in Memphis, heteronormativity and obscenity prosecutions in Los Angeles, the filmmaker Pat Rocco's gay erotic softcore films of the late 1960s, and the fault lines of modern feminist activism, have also appeared in such venues as the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of Women’s History, American Quarterly, Radical History Review, and Journal of Social History, as well as such popular venues as Vice, ThinkProgress, Newark's Star-Ledger, the Washington Post, Slate, OutHistory, Salon, and Temple of Schlock. 

Teaching in History, American Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies, and LGBT Studies, Strub’s courses frequently focus on matters of gender, sexuality, culture, film, and politics. He also co-directs the Queer Newark Oral History Project. 

Courses Taught

Undergraduate: American Legal History (two-semester survey); Introduction to LGBT Studies; Visions of the City in American Cinema; Senior Seminar: Gender and Sexuality in American History

Graduate: Radical Film History; Law and Culture in American History; Sexuality and American Culture

Publications

Books

Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (Columbia University Press, 2011; paperback, August 2013)

Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (University Press of Kansas, September 2013)

Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s, co-edited with Carolyn Bronstein (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)

Recent Writing for Popular Venues

“A Requiem for a Porn Movie House,” Star-Ledger, July 2018 (published as “This little porn movie house learned to survive for decades—until last week,” NJ.com)

“Remembering One Eleven Wines, a Pre-Stonewall Win Against Homophobic State Surveillance” (with Tim Stewart-Winter), Slate, November 2017

“Hugh Hefner’s safe sex” (with Carolyn Bronstein), Washington Post, September 2017

“Why Libraries Need to Archive Porn,” Vice, February 2017          

“In Hispanic Heritage Month, Let’s Remember Gay Rights Pioneer Tony Segura,” Slate, October 2016

“Can New Jersey’s Last Porn Theater Survive Gentrification?” Vice, June 2016

“How NJ’s LGBT-friendly clubs have long strived for safety” (with Tim Stewart-Winter), Star-Ledger, June 2016

“Utah and the war on porn: Our long national history of condemning ‘obscenity’ as public enemy #1,” Salon, April 2016

“Merry XXX-Mas: A brief history of Yuletide smut,” Salon, Christmas 2015 (with Laura Helen Marks)

Selected Scholarly Articles/Chapters

“Gay Liberation (1963-1980),” The Routledge History of Queer America, ed. Don Romesburg (Routledge, 2018), 82-94

“Modernizing Decency: Citizens for Decent Literature and Covert Catholic Activism in Cold War America,” Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States, eds. Bethany Moreton, Heather White, and Gillian Frank (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 133-151

“Sex Wishes and Virgin Dreams: Zebedy Colt’s Reactionary Queer Heterosmut and the Elusive Porn Archive,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23.3 (2017): 359-390

“Heat Wave: The Memphis Deep Throat Trials and Sexual Politics in the 1970s,” Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture, ed. Trent Brown (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 86-112

“The Homophile is a Sexual Being: Wallace de Ortega Maxey’s Pulp Theology and Gay Activism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25.2 (2016): 323-353

“The Baraka Film Archive: The Lost, Unmade, and Unseen Film Work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka,” Black Camera 7.1 (2015): 273-287

Email: wstrub@rutgers.edu

Phone: 973-353-3887

Office Location

306 Conklin Hall

175 University Ave.

Newark, NJ 07102

Ian Watson is a professor and RU-N Coordinator of the Rutgers/NJIT Theatre Arts Program. He is the author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993, 1995) and Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002).  He edited Performer Training Across Cultures (Harwood/Routledge, 2001). He has contributed chapters to over a dozen books, and published numerous articles in journals such as New Theatre Quarterly, About Performance, The Drama Review, Issues in Integrative Studies, The Latin American Theatre Review, Asian Theatre Journal,  Latin American Theatre Review, and Gestos.  He is an Advisory Editor for New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre, Dance and Performer Training, and About Performance.

Email: idwatson@newark.rutgers.edu